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Comment by watermelon0 | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me even more, is that you need developer account (100$/year), and go through these manual reviews, if you want to develop and tests apps on simulator or your own iOS devices.

They already have manual review process for submitting apps to the App Store, so I don't understand why I would also need permissions before I start developing apps using restricted features.

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My iOS developer story ended shortly after I attempted to start back in 2008. To run apps I’d written on a device I had to sign up and pay for an account, which I was ok with. Then my account was suspended until I proved who I was with a scan of a government issued document. As a non US citizen my ID had little protection so I said no. After a few months apple agreed and refund my $99. So I’ve never written for iOS. The upside was I made a small profit thanks to a swing in the exchange rate :)

This happened to me too, I’m surprised more people don’t talk about it.

For personal development the account is free. You only need to pay if you are releasing apps to the App Store.

I haven't renewed my Apple Developer subscription in a few years but I'm still developing and testing apps at home on the free tier. It hasn't been necessary to the subscription for a few years. Only if you plan to release to the App Store or want developer betas.

This is incorrect. None of the things you describe require a paid developer account.

You do if you want to use UDP multicast or want to enumerate MDNS services. That's what this article is about. If I understand correctly, they apparently don't even let you use multicast on your own phone for testing without requesting permission.

This. If you need restricted features, like I mentioned in my comment, Apple needs to approve it for your development team, before you can create provisioning profile for signing the app, to be able to run it on real devices.

However, I was partially wrong (it's been some time since I needed this), you can actually use them in the simulator without an approval.

List of special entitlements needing an approval: https://stackoverflow.com/a/65330176

Additionally, I know that CarPlay entitlements need an approval: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/carplay/requesting...

> want to enumerate MDNS services

Only if you want to create a wildcard listener. If you know the exact name of the service you want to listen out for, you do not need the entitlement.

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